


Ellie Potter: A Character Study

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus [9]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study, Female Harry Potter, Friendship, Gen, Master of Death Harry Potter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 10:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15749835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: Neville thinks about his classmate Ellie Potter and about the difference between what they thought she would be like and how she is. In the end she doesn't seem to want to live up to any of their expectations.





	Ellie Potter: A Character Study

Everyone had grown up hearing about the girl who lived. It seemed like she was mentioned every day, and even before meeting her Neville knew she was going to be someone special.

 

He’d thought she’d be pretty, that she’d be talented but sweet, but more than that she would be good. Just sheer good so that everyone around her felt happy but also inferior in comparison, because she was the girl who lived, and they were just people. Even before seeing her, before meeting her on the train or anywhere else Neville had prepared himself to be overlooked, to maybe only say a word to her before disappearing into obscurity.

 

Neville, after all, was nothing like the girl who lived. He barely had magic, never any accidental magic until Uncle Algie had thrown him out a window and even then, as he was flying through the air he’d thought for a terrifying moment that he was a squib and that if he hit the ground then it would all be over. He bounced though, he did bounce, and his aunt had cried his uncle had grinned and they’d bought him a toad called Trevor.

 

Even with his father’s wand though he felt as if he still wasn’t a wizard, was barely a wizard at all, and the girl who lived wouldn’t even look twice at him.

 

He was wrong though, as incredible as it seemed he was wrong about that.

 

Ellie Potter in real life was very different than the Ellie Potter everyone had imagined. He didn’t want to say she wasn’t pretty but she wasn’t pretty in the way that Daphne Greengrass was pretty or Cho Chang was pretty, she looked different was what he wanted to settle on in the end. She looked like she wasn’t a little girl, well she looked like one but she didn’t act like one. On the train she’d been wearing muggle clothing and pretty worn muggle clothing by the look of it, but she didn’t look or act like a muggle born, that was evident just by looking at her and Hermione Granger in the same room. She didn’t have that muggle born aura that Hermione had, not necessarily a bad thing but noticeable all the same, she almost seemed otherworldly really. Her skin was very pale, almost as pale as Draco Malfoy’s, and her red curly hair barely pulled out of her face. It was her eyes though, those sharp green eyes, that seemed to be her dominant feature.

 

A terrible green, all sorts of shades trapped inside, that saw you and saw through you all at once.

 

It was hard believing she was a first year student like the rest of them, she didn’t act like any of them that was for sure. There was a casualness to her but it wasn’t casual there was also an edge to it, whenever he saw her like that it was like watching a very powerful wizard who at the first syllable of a spell could disarm the other wizard without breaking a sweat. She wasn’t soft, like any of them had pictured, she was hard and odd and more than a little disarming in person. Like you didn’t know what to think of her even after she had long since left the room but that you still had to think about her because her very presence just demanded it.

 

For the first few days most of Gryffindor thought she was crazy, mostly this was because she was in Slytherin, but it was also because of the things she said or did. Even when she wasn’t in the room or in their house they had to talk about her, as if there wasn’t anything else worth saying.

 

“I hear she has this rabbit that she brings everywhere with her, keeps saying he’ll eat Scotland if she doesn’t bring him to class.” Seamus was saying in the common room having overheard about this during the day.

 

Ron had moodily added, “Says he’s a demon from the outer abyss, or something, crazy snake’s probably trying to get him to eat the school or something.”

 

Neville had sat on the couch awkwardly wondering if he should bring up the fact that the rabbit hadn’t been in his potion before he’d started mixing things in, and he didn’t think it’d been in there before the explosion, but it had appeared like it’d been there the whole time and when it had stared at him…

 

He didn’t like to think about her rabbit too much because sometimes he wondered if she really wasn’t kidding about the whole thing.

 

They also said that during her first class in History of Magic she’d taught the class and rewrote history so that a couple people who nobody had ever heard of had a battle with the Goblins in Gringotts over some muggle political theory. The Hufflepuffs had mostly just been confused about the whole thing and all they had really heard was that she had wandlessly knocked out Nott after a giant argument.

 

What was known was that she carried her familiar, a rabbit named Rabbit everywhere, that she had lost eighty house points in one day by provoking Snape and then Quirrel, and that she was unbelievably talented when it came to magic.

 

He did want to say she was good though, it was just hard to see sometimes, or maybe it wasn’t. Certainly she could be terrifying, she never talked like an eleven year old, but there were times where she talked like someone you really wanted to be scared of more so than even Snape. Sometimes, in Potions, she made Snape seem like a Hogwarts student himself who was just trying to act tough in the face of something much more dangerous. It was those moments that always made him remember that she really was the girl who lived, a baby girl who had blown up You Know Who when he cast the killing curse, and maybe it wasn’t as poetic and beautiful as they all had thought. Every day it seemed she did something a little scary, never towards him, and usually not unprovoked but that edge of steel was always somewhere in her eyes.

 

She did stand up for him and for the rest of them though, when Malfoy took his remembrall Ellie was the one who gave it back to him saying with a smile and confidence to match, “Mini Pimp isn’t going to give you any more trouble.” And she was the one who distracted Snape during that first detention so that he wasn’t just looking at Neville and being terrifying. So she was good, she just wasn’t the kind of good you saw in stories, or the soft good you thought about when you pictured the girl who lived.

 

So she wasn’t like anything any of them pictured or like anyone any of them had heard of and no one seemed clear on what to make of her. Slytherin, Hufflepuff, Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, dark, light, they all just seemed to fall through and she just remained Ellie the way she had on the train before any of them were sorted.

 

In Gryffindor, after Wednesday, she became the talk of the dorm again. Except instead of being an evil Slytherin she was a Gryffindor behind enemy lines. “You should have seen her Neville, the way she took down Malfoy, it was amazing!”

 

Neville, being in the hospital wing, had missed Ellie kicking Malfoy’s ass singlehandedly without a wand but he’d heard about it later. When he’d asked her about it she’d just shrugged, “They needed a demonstration,” She’d said before adding, “Besides the true war has yet to begin.”

 

However whether it was the true war or not, whatever those ominous words had meant, Gryffindor was cheering her on both in her point loss and in her putting the Slytherins back into their places.

 

“At the rate she’s going, even if they win every quidditch game the whole year, they’ll never get the cup!” Dean cried cheering to which Oliver Wood the quidditch captain objected, “Hey, they may be good this year but they won’t get close to that cup!”

 

Everyone, even people outside of their year, were celebrating Ellie’s victory against Slytherin that night both with her loss of points during the week and with her actions during flying lessons. Fred and George Weasley, the notorious school pranksters, looked at each other, “I think we need to get into the recruiting business, Fred.”

 

Fred then nodded, “Such talent like that can’t be wasted, George.”

 

And then together they’d said, “It’s for the good of the school that she join our cause.”

 

Neville really didn’t know how he felt about Fred, George, and Ellie pranking the school together; he just had the feeling that it was a bad idea. Of course the Ellie Potter they’d all imagined wouldn’t have been a prankster at all, or even capable of it, it just went to show how wrong they were about everything.

 

He’d asked her about it, at lunch on that first day she’d shown up at the Gryffindor table, she’d looked at him, “Oh, people are stupid.”

 

“Stupid?” He’d asked and she’d nodded before continuing.

 

“They get all sorts of ideas that are just plain wrong.” She said and then motioned to Rabbit who had taken his customary spot on the table, “Just look at Rabbit, how many times have I told these people that leaving Rabbit alone is disastrous and no one has listened. They just think because he looks like a rabbit he is a rabbit and when I tell them that no just because it looks like something doesn’t mean that it is they get all huffy. It’s like they want Hogwarts to be eaten, it’s ridiculous.”

 

He wasn’t sure what to think of the Rabbit statement but after thinking about it he supposed she was right. They had thought and made an idea of what Ellie had looked like in their heads and when she didn’t match they became upset as if it was somehow her fault when really it was theirs. Girls who lived shouldn’t necessarily have standards, after all there was only Ellie to go off of, so maybe it was their model that was wrong and not hers.

 

Maybe the girl who lived wasn’t supposed to look like Daphne Greengrass and be soft and kind and sweet even as she was talented at magic. Maybe she was supposed to be in Slytherin only not, talk weird, and have a familiar that she claimed ate things like people and places.

 

Either way Ellie didn’t look like she was going to change any time soon, even if she turned Hogwarts upside down in the process, she’d just be the same Ellie she’d always been and leave it up to the rest of them to make up their minds.

 

Good, bad, Gryffindor, Slytherin, she was there to stay and there was nothing any of them could do about it.

 

And somehow, thinking about the girl who lived he thought she’d be he couldn’t help but think that he preferred this version, because the other one wouldn’t have looked at him twice.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a 100th review of "Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus" asking for Neville's early thoughts on Lily.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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